Time to Let Go (3 page)

It was cruel that there were days when he could be tempted to believe that her fading memory was on the mend, almost promising a complete recovery; then, unpredictably, the disease would take that hope and present him with a shadow of his wife who could be a complete stranger, a child or a lunatic. It was as the doctor had said: “Every patient is different.” So why burden oneself with doom and gloom?

“Do you feel like cycling or do you want us to take the car?”

“I would love to cycle. How far did you say it is?” she asked.

“No more than twenty minutes,
” Walter answered.

“Ok then.”

The two of them put on their shoes and bicycle helmets and took to the road. Their house was on a quiet residential cul-de-sac with both speed bumps and a lowered speed limit because of a playground at the end of the road. A footpath next to it led to the canal from where one could easily get into town.

Biddy and Walter had been passionate about sport all of their lives, which was the reason why he tried to get her to do as much exercise as she was willing to take part in. This was another constant part of her life that he wa
nted to keep up for as long as possible. The speed and the dangerous behaviour of younger and more aggressive cyclists on the path was a bit of a worry but it was the lesser evil for Biddy, compared to a further loss of mental and emotional stability that the abandonment of cycling and her active lifestyle could bring.

Their trip took them past
the local cemetery, a place where Biddy once used to spend a lot of her time, visiting the grave of her mother and her sister, lighting candles and replacing old flowers with fresh ones. Walter tried not to take her there. On a bad day she could go through the same heart-rendering routine and cry and relive the pain of losing the two women again, but if she suggested making a stop he always obliged her, cherishing her initiative and hoping that any connection to the past and her life before the illness was a good thing, even if the occasion was a sad one.

Today Biddy seemed too involved with observing the wildlife on the canal t
o notice the cemetery and they arrived in the town centre in almost record time. As had been her habit before the disease, Biddy went straight to the fruit market stand and looked at the prices.

“Two pounds?” she said, lifting a basket of grapes and pretending to be gasping
for air. “No! That should be twenty pence.”

Walter calculated in his mind
when said twenty pence would have been the actual price for grapes. He had found that lately his wife seemed mentally to regress to a certain time or age in her life when she had a better recollection than the confused present time. Depending on the day she could behave as young as a child, as she had done earlier, or a little older, if they were lucky. Maybe, as more and more of her recent memory vanished, she was coping by seeking refuge in an era that - on her personal time line - was safe and so protected from memory loss. Although the progress of this loss was not occurring in a strictly reverse chronological order, from the present towards her childhood, at times it was how one could perceive the development. In that regard, there again was no consistency, however hard he tried to create it. The younger she became in her mind the less he was dealing with an equal or a life partner any more.

“Biddy
don’t worry. I am going to buy grapes in the supermarket later. They are still cheap there. Would you like to feed the ducks now?” he suggested quickly.

Whenever her world clash
ed with the details of reality - like now over the price of grapes – she could become agitated and upset. In his eyes some of those clashes justified the risk of pain because he hoped that they might trigger something to bring her into the present time – at least for a moment - but fretting over the price of grapes wasn’t going to help.

“Yes. Do we have bread?” she asked.

“Yes, I brought some from the larder.”

“Oh, you think of everything.
”

For the next half hour he watched his wife as she was talking to and feeding the ducks in a pond in a nearby park. This was a very quiet time of day for the birds. School children were at class and mothers with young ones seemed to come out
here a little later than this: the pond was all hers. It amazed him how much joy and entertainment his wife could gain from such a simple thing as feeding the ducks.

Her
zest for life still showed frequently and sometimes even seemed completely unbroken by the disease. When she was first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease she had desperately tried to fight it and in the process she had suffered a lot. She had read all the books there were, taken supplements and tried to train her brain with exercises.

“Come to bed,” Walter had said to her one evening when she had spent several hours in the study with her brain teasers.

“But I must solve this puzzle,” Biddy shot back at him. “I can’t finish unless I get this right.”

“
Do it tomorrow, love.”

“No,” Biddy hissed. “I need to do it now.”

“You are probably too tired to solve it tonight. You need sleep more than this exercise,” Walter tried again.

“Mind your own business,” she yelled and slammed her fist on the table.

Walter was so surprised at this uncharacteristic outburst he stood frozen and had no reply ready. While he struggled to come up with a response to this unprecedented shouting over nothing, Biddy doubled over on the desk and started to sob.

“I can’t do it, Walter,” she cried. “I just can’t do it.”

“You don’t need to do everything today. Do it tomorrow.”

“That’s not just it, Walter. I’ve forgotten something else but I can’t remember what it is. I know it is something really important that I must do. I should have written it down.”

Walter walked up to her and tried to hug her.

“Get off me,” she screamed and yanked his hand away. “You don’t know what
it is like. Don’t patronise me!”

Walter wanted to shout back at her, to make her snap out of her mood, but he was just too surprised to think of what he could possibly say. His wife had never pushed him away before.

He had left her in the study and went to bed. Biddy had stayed up for hours turning the house upside down for clues as to what she had forgotten. He did not sleep a wink that night and many more to follow when his wife was on a mission to locate a misplaced item.

Fortunately
, they eventually passed that very awkward period of her life and these days she no longer seemed to care and no longer wasted her time in agony over the spilled beans of her mind. He wondered if that was part of her complex drug regime. He suspected that the doctors had slipped her an anti-depressant or a sedative of sorts into her cocktail of daily pills. He would rather not know and so he never asked about it and only ever read the dosage instructions on the prescription sheet.

Biddy’s manners these da
ys were innocent and childlike. Her optimism and her famous positive attitude had been the core of her character and she had helped many of her friends and family to overcome crisis after crisis with her unbreakable spirit.

Watching her being happy and joyful while feeding the stupid ducks he felt that
, for a moment, everything was just as it always had been. He could see the young woman he had married underneath the wrinkles, the white hair and behind the blank stare she often had these days when she got confused.

Right now the bright light of her essence was visible and it warmed Walter on the inside. Such moments gave him the necessary strength to accept the things
he was missing from his married life of late.

They were
sitting on a familiar bench with their bicycles leaning against it and he observed the traffic behind the edge of the park. It was a happy place for the Korhonen family, a tradition they had created with all of their children. Each one of them had adored coming here and feeding the birds. He thought he recognised a few pedestrians and cyclists passing by. There were friends and acquaintances who he was sure must have seen him and Biddy but who obviously had decided not to come over and say hello. No one was to blame. It took a lot of courage and emotional strength to speak to Biddy if you didn’t know how to.

“More bread?” Biddy called out to her husband.

“I am sorry darling. That was all we have. Let’s come here again tomorrow, I am sure someone else will come today and feed them. They won’t be hungry for long. I am getting chilly; maybe we could grab a cup of tea somewhere? What do you say?”

“Hot chocolate!” his wife said. “And cake. Do you think we can afford that? Did we bring enough money?”

“Of course we have,” Walter replied. When she used language like ‘enough money’ and ‘afford it’, it seemed an indicator that she had retreated once more into the vault of her past. Judging from her craving for a hot chocolate Walter guessed she had assumed the age of a teenager and was probably thinking of him as one of her brothers. Whether she thought of him as her husband at all any more, or whether she had merely accepted him as the familiar person she saw every day was something he tried desperately not to contemplate. He feared the day when she would stop recognising him and maybe even stop tolerating him being in the same room with her. He knew from a film he had once seen that this might happen.

At a modern coffee shop just
outside the pedestrianized area, Biddy chose a flapjack from the cake display to go with her hot chocolate.

“I didn’t bring my purse.”

“That is quite all right,” Walter assured her. “I have money.”

“Good morning Mrs Korhonen,” said the waitress.

“No,” Biddy told her. “My name is Biddy. Short for Elizabeth. Elizabeth Hargreaves.”

It hurt him to hear her rejecting t
heir family name after almost fifty years of marriage, seeing more of their past drifting away. If she could not remember marrying him, did he still have the right to even call her his wife and to take care of her?

“Fine, Biddy. Are you two ready to order?” said the waitress smiling. She served the odd couple at least twice a week and her way of dealing with the situation was to humour Biddy. It was something which Walter strongly disliked but which he had learned to accept, especially when it came from friendly and obviously well-meaning strangers. It still felt as if he and Biddy were being patronised, though.

Hanna would have approved of the belittling way the waitress was treating his wife and would have encouraged her to carry on. Maybe that was how people in the service industry treated everyone who was slightly different from the norm, just so that they could carry on with their job. Walter let out a deep sigh of frustration and then placed their order.

While they were waiting for their drinks an old school friend of
Biddy came into the coffee shop and walked straight up to their table.

“Hello Biddy! How are you?” the woman asked.

“Good, thank you for asking,” was the almost automatic response. “How are you?”

It would not have been obvious to an outsider whether Biddy had recognised her friend or not. Biddy had dropped tricky details, such as names, from her conversations a long time ago.

“Do you know who I am?” the friend asked directly but luckily she decided to give the answer away before putting Biddy cruelly on the spot. “I am Minnie. Minnie Crook. Or maybe you remember me as Minnie Chadwick. We went to school together. I married Martin Crook.”

“Of course, of course!”
Biddy said with apparent lack of conviction. “How is he?”

“Oh sweetheart, Martin died a few years
ago. You went to the funeral.”

“I am sorry Minni
e; her memory has deteriorated since you last saw her. I am not sure she recognises you at all,” Walter interrupted, trying to rescue the situation.

“
But I do recognise you!”  Biddy insisted. “You look more like your mother now.”

“That is right,” Minnie said laughing. “I am old now. Just say it like it is,” but turning to Walter she mouthed: “You poor thing.”

“It is quite all right,” he reassured her. “Biddy and I are just fine. What are you doing in town? How are your children?”

Minnie looked nervously at Biddy, unsure whether to involve her in the conversation or better just to speak to Walter alone.

“I just came into town to return my books to the library. Since Martin...you know...I have been reading a lot, something I did not have enough time for before he...well, the kids are fine I guess. Ryan is now a lecturer at the university and Emma is pregnant again. That will be her fourth and from her third marriage. I told her it is madness. She is 43. You know what they say about giving birth at that age and it is not as if there aren’t enough children in the world already as it is. But it is a new man and she wants to seal the union with a child. I am worried sick that it will come out with a defect but Emma says the scans are all fine.”

Walter sat dumbfounded by this verbal assault and the use of double negatives, but he managed to get out: “I am sure it will be all fine. You know modern technology and medicine have come a long way since our days. Especially with giving birth, the doctors have perfected their ways. I wouldn’t worry. If only they had advanced that far with old age and its side effects,” with a meaningful glance at his wife, who had followed the conversation, nodding with seemingly great interest yet with no indications that she knew what was being discussed.